Cons:

Playing SimCity Creator reveals that the Wii Remote isn't quite the perfect city-building tool you might hope it to be. It's infinitely more comfortable to point at the screen and select icons from the comfort of your couch, for instance, but it's really quite difficult to perfectly connect your roads and drop small structures into ideal positions. A mouse just works better for the smaller stuff. But it's hard to argue with the delight you'll experience at painting fields of yellows, greens, and blues, and to then see these splashes of color spring into life as a living, breathing city.

Building a city takes a lot of careful planning, perhaps more than one could possibly expect from a younger player or a more casual gamer, the types that make up a large segment of the Wii audience. You have to manage the kinds of things that city planners agonize over on a day-to-day basis, things that droves of local government employees can struggle with in the real world.

Residential, commercial, and industrial zones need adequate power, and the placement of power lines can't overlap the streets, roads, and rails of your traffic layout. Underground, you'll have to weave intricate matrices of pipes and pumps to keep the water flowing to all the faucets and dig out subway lines to keep the people moving when the above-ground traffic gets worse than LA's. A properly laid-out city is a work of art that can take an incalculable amount of work to get "just right," and the sort of project that can always be improved upon, fiddled with, and carefully polished.

Since the days of the original SimCity this construction and hands-on building has been capably turned into engaging gameplay experiences. But then there are the budget sheets and hum-drum aspects of the game that can put many gamers to sleep. Why not have access to a financial advisor to just automate the process, so we don't have to deal with raising and lowering taxes as the demands of the city ebb and flow? You wouldn't put an architect in charge of the budgets, just like you wouldn't have an accountant in charge of designing a new city center to draw in tourist traffic and increase spending. The fun in a game like SimCity Creator comes from laying out a unique, hand-made cityscape, and in playing with the design tools like a kid with a box of crayons.

Thankfully, the tools provided by SimCity Creator make many of the tasks required for city-building a cinch. You can lay down your various zones in a grid, with streets already built in at regular intervals, so you can get that nice even grid layout from the get-go. The grid pattern defaults to streets, but you can easily upgrade these to roads with a few points and clicks.

The Wii Remote is used almost like a painting tool, allowing you to fill in gaps in your city layout with whatever structures or features you like, dropping a park here, a police kiosk there, until you make use of all your available building space like a canvas where every pixel of available space should go towards improving the lives of your Sims.